World’s fastest switch zaps out of Australia

A new Sydney-based financial technology firm believes it has
created the fastest switching device on the planet, with a latency of around
130 nanoseconds.

Zeptonics’ ZeptoMux is the first product from a new firm
which caters to latency-sensitive financial clients.

The 130ns ZeptoMux is an ethernet device that delivers a
fibre-to-fibre performance (including SFP+s) that’s significantly faster than
any switch on the market. A 10GbE 23-to-1 multiplexing switch, it is optimised
for trading applications. The 24-port single rack unit appliance is scheduled
for general availability in August.

Founded and largely staffed by former quant traders and
trading system developers, Zeptonics is billed as a firm that was conceived to
solve problems encountered during the principals’ trading careers.

“The team at Zeptonics are re-thinking traditional
approaches to latency challenges,” said founder Matt Hurd. “With hardware, for
example, most network switches include features that deliver flexibility, but
deny you the opportunity to aggressively minimise latency. When designing the
ZeptoMux, our engineers stripped out all non-essential functionality and
created a streamlined ‘race car’ device to replace the broad-purpose ‘sports
car’ switches currently used by the industry.”

Hurd said the ZeptoMux is designed to funnel messages from
multiple downstream nodes to a single upstream service, and back again, as
quickly as possible.

“That makes it perfect for co-located trading environments,
and other speed-sensitive network scenarios,” he said. “Unlike general purpose
n-to-n switches, the ZeptoMux is an n-to-1-to-n device that’s specifically
engineered for financial market funnels, where low latency performance is in
highest demand.”